The Secrets of Lizzie Borden (31 page)

Upon waking I feel such emptiness; it is unbearable and almost indescribable, because I once knew what it was like to be filled, to be complete. My arms
ache
to enfold him, my legs to twine around him, and there is such a keen, sharp yearning in the intimate place between, such an unbearable, aching emptiness to have him back and hold him deep inside me, to feel again that sacred moment of completeness. And to know that I never will again . . . I do not think the Spanish Inquisition could have devised any torture equal to or greater than the feeling that accompanies that knowledge.

In Orrin's arms I felt complete, as if I had been wandering lost all my life and had
finally
found my home, my home sweet home, not gaudy, magnificent Maplecroft as I always thought, but my
true
home, the place where I belonged that I had been searching for my whole life long.
They say home is where the heart is,
and my heart was—and still is—with the man I love, but I am a wanderer once again, damned like the Wandering Jew, destined to walk alone for the rest of my life, and perhaps for all eternity as well. Emma was right! God sometimes punishes those He only seems to favor by giving them
exactly
what they want—but I would amend that and add “and then He snatches it away again.”

And
that
is even worse.

Chapter
10

A
fter I lost Orrin, and the frenzy of public interest had subsided somewhat, I ran away from Fall River. I wanted to mourn, to shed my tears, in solitude, without everyone in town staring, straining to see through my veil, avid to catch a gloating glimpse of my red-rimmed, swollen eyes when I finally did come out of hiding. I couldn't hide from the world forever, and the longer I put it off I knew the worse it would be. Finally, when I couldn't stand the dread gnawing at my stomach a moment longer, I decided to just get it over with so I could put it behind me. I couldn't go back in time, and I had lingered in limbo long enough, so the only choice left to me was to go forward.

I put on a fancy fringed dress of chartreuse and emerald satin diamonds all sewn together like patchwork with bold gold thread and a hat like a gilt-sprigged chartreuse chiffon nest cradling a dark-green bird and hung my throat and ears with pearls and emeralds and ordered Monsieur Tetrault to get the carriage ready and drive me to Gifford's. I held myself erect and regal as an empress carved out of ice as I bought a set of fruit forks with mother-of-pearl handles, and a second set of monogrammed silver pickle forks, and a faux eighteenth-century music box with a white-wigged couple dressed fit for a ball at Versailles dancing to Mozart's
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
. Then I went home, packed a single carpet bag, and away I went with the dawn on the first train out of Fall River.

I took a cottage on Cape Cod. It was the off-season, so most of them were empty, leaving me blessedly free to walk the sands in peace and blame my red eyes and nose on the wind without being subjected to false smiles, smirks, and knowing nods. And there were no lovers or happy families on the beach to torment me with reminders of all that I had lost. Every day I stood for hours, hugging myself and shivering beneath my shawl, staring out at the choppy gray sea that seemed to mirror the turmoil within my soul, watching the waves crash and roll, and the gulls soar and dive, always seeking, sometimes finding.

One day the wind snatched my shawl away. I let it go. It was just one shawl, a common knitted one, and I had many more much finer. I watched it fly away, like my love, beyond my grasp, its maroon folds momentarily taking the shape of a heart—a
bleeding, wounded heart!
—as it rose high in the grim gray sky.

To my surprise, sometime later—mere minutes or hours I cannot tell you; I had by then, in all those aimless hours spent walking the shore, lost all sense of time—I felt it settle comfortingly around my shoulders again. It came back to me, the way I wished Orrin would. I spun around to find myself staring into the kindest pair of brown eyes I had ever seen. They warmed me like a cup of hot cocoa.

She looked as weary as I did, there were fine crinkled lines and dark shadows around her eyes, and even when she smiled sorrow tried to pull her pink lips down. Though she couldn't have been much older than me—ten years, just like Emma, Time would soon reveal—the golden hair coiled high atop her head was threaded thickly with silver. I would soon learn that arthritis was her own private devil that had tormented her joints unceasingly since early childhood and she was in almost constant pain. She had traveled several times to Europe searching for, if not a cure, at least some relief, in the baths or in liniments, but
never
drugs; she could not
bear
to have anything dull her mind.

Her name was Sarah Orne Jewett. She was a lady novelist who had come to Cape Cod to finish a book unencumbered by the distractions of daily life. Lately there had been too many of them; seemingly every time she turned around another tempest was brewing in the teapot or someone was making demands upon her time, wanting her to do this or that and making it impossible for her to say
no
. Finally, she just had to throw up her hands and say
Enough!
, pack her bags, and run away. Quite renowned, famous even, she knew a little something about notoriety and insatiable public curiosity. That was the common ground we met upon. In her case, love at first sight with her publisher's wife had led to a cordial, if not legal, severance of the marital bond and the two ladies setting up house together in Boston. It was
almost
as shocking as murder. The number of books the scandal sold almost made up to Mr. Fields for the loss of his wife.

Sarah gave her hand to me. I took it. She was easy to talk to. She seemed to understand as no one else did. That night I found myself sitting before a fireplace again, nestled in a cozy cocoon of cushions and blankets, orange flames dancing, crackling, casting a magical golden glow to warm both my body and my cold, ailing soul. Staring into a cup of hot spiced tea, I saw myself before another fireplace, with Orrin on the night that made me think that Heaven could very well be a place on earth. Tears rolled down my face, drip-dropping into my tea, as I remembered, and relived, every excruciatingly sweet caress and tender kiss, and the way he had filled and fulfilled me.

Sarah took the cup away and put her arms around me and I leaned into her gratefully.

“God never closes a door without opening a window, Lizbeth,” she said, her lips so soft and warm against my face as her kisses gently followed the trail of my tears. I shivered, arched my back, and sighed as her lips strayed down to the hollow of my throat. “There is always something more for us, Lizbeth,” she continued, “waiting out there; we have only to go out and seek . . . and find . . . or invite it in to us. . . .”

I turned to her. I needed someone
so
badly; I was in
so much
pain and
throbbing
with need! Our lips met and our bodies followed suit, merging and melting together until I felt I was alone no longer.

For two weeks, history repeated itself every night. Every day I walked the sands while Sarah wrote, and we made love every night in front of that fireplace, and in bed one last time before putting out the light, and every morning before we rose to breakfast. Sarah firmly believed “love feeds the soul like nourishing food feeds the body, Lizbeth, and a wise person always starts the day with a good breakfast.”

God had been kind after all; when He slammed the door on Orrin He opened a window and showed me Sarah. I had
finally
found someone who
really
could understand me, someone who had also drunk from the vinegary cup of fame and wouldn't be frightened away by its foul taste. Or so I thought, and then I found the notebook.

One night when I couldn't sleep and didn't want my tossing and turning to wake Sarah, I picked it up in idle curiosity from the desk and went to sit by the fire with it. I'm both glad I did and wish that I didn't. It was like opening Pandora's box. It was
all
about me, page after page, a rush of words written in frantically flowing black ink, as though she had been desperate to get it
all
down before she could forget a single thing, the script cramped and crooked because of her painful hands, ideas for a novel based upon my life, with all the names and places changed of course, but still completely recognizable so that any half-wit would know her inspiration, her muse, was Lizzie Borden. There was my heart laid bare and bleeding upon those ivory pages just as though Sarah had
ripped
it right out of my breast and offered it up as a cannibal sacrifice for the greedy public to devour! My every confidence betrayed!
Everything
I had told her and ideas about how to weave it into the plot. Descriptions of people and places, snippets of dialogue, and whole scenarios!

I had been a
fool
to trust her! So desperate and needy that I was blind! The only thing to be thankful for was that I hadn't told her the truth about the murders or mentioned David Anthony; I clung tenaciously to the truth of my innocence. I had told her that I only stayed in Fall River in the hope that someday the
real
killer might be discovered and I would truly be vindicated and acquitted in the court of public opinion, which seemed in the end to matter more than any legal one.

As I closed the covers I thought I heard God laughing. He seemed to take a fiendish delight in slamming doors upon my heart. Would it
ever
hurt and bleed enough to satisfy Him?

I flung the notebook from me in disgust, straight into the fire, without stopping to think that it wasn't mine to destroy. But I didn't care! To me that was just a trivial point. It was
my
life filling that notebook; thus, to my mind, I had the right. I sat and watched it burn. Then I silently gathered up my clothes and went back to my own cottage. I packed my carpet bag and caught the first train I could. I didn't care where it took me, as long as it was far away from Sarah and the place where I thought I had found happiness when I was least expecting it.

I left no word for Sarah. The cold and dead ashes she would find in the fireplace would convey everything I had to say more succinctly than any actual words spoken by me ever could.

She never wrote to me to apologize or explain. I suppose she was too ashamed. No phoenix ever rose from those ashes. For years to come I would always feel afraid whenever a new book by her appeared on the store shelves, but she never wrote a character or situation that seemed even remotely inspired by me, and for that I was most grateful. God extended me
one small
mercy at least.

 

That summer I found myself aimless and adrift and not quite sure what to do with myself in Providence, Rhode Island. I shopped to alleviate the boredom and bring more beautiful things into my life. One of my favorite stores was the city's oldest and finest, Tilden & Thurber, a combination art gallery, gift shop, and jewelry store that had been in business since 1790. As I idly browsed their shop on Westminster Street I was smitten by two little oval paintings on porcelain in frames like golden lace.

I was rather surprised to see them in Tilden & Thurber; their amorous motif seemed a trifle risqué for such a formal and reserved establishment. The first,
Love's Dream,
depicted a beautiful young woman sleeping as Cupid, with his arrow poised, like an erect phallus, hovered above her. She was naked and her black hair tumbled over the pillows; one arm was flung out as though her slumber was a restless one, troubled by dreams. As further proof of her restlessness, she had kicked the sheets off, and one knee was bent and her legs slightly parted, suggesting perhaps that her dream was an amorous one. Roses, their pink petals suggestive of a woman's intimate parts, wreathed the entire scene. The second painting,
Love's Awakening,
showed a lover in powdered wig and knee breeches, stealthily approaching, and the sleeping beauty rousing, aroused, and opening her arms and legs to him as she drew him down into her welcoming embrace.

What struck me most was the young woman's resemblance to Lulie Stillwell at the height of her ebony-haired, ruby-red-lipped, snow-white-skinned fairy-tale princess beauty. The titles that had been given to the paintings seemed to fit
so
perfectly our, or rather my, peculiar circumstances. Lulie had been my ideal, my dream of love, for so many years, and the passage of years and her marriage to Johnny Hiram had never diminished that; she was still the ghost who haunted my dreams, the figure in my favorite fantasies, the one whose reincarnation I was always hoping to find in the women I took to my bed. She had been the one who had truly awakened my desires.

Then I did a foolish thing, a
very
foolish thing. I was sick of seeing my name in the newspapers, of
everything
I did being gossiped about, so I asked the clerk if I might see a vase that was locked in a glass display case. While she had her back to me, I swiftly slipped the two little paintings into my handbag.

On impulse, as soon as I returned to Maplecroft I packed them up carefully in blue tissue paper and sent them to Lulie.
I dreamed of you last night,
I wrote with a tremulous hand,
but I don't dare put my dreams down on paper
. I let the paintings speak for me instead, and be my declaration of desire, the words I could not say.

Lulie's response was to wait until she was next in Providence to do some Christmas shopping and take the paintings back to Tilden & Thurber. The labels I had left in place, pasted on the back of each painting so she would know that my gift came from one of the finest shops in all New England, made it quite easy for her to do this. She explained to the clerk that she had received them as a gift—
an unwanted gift!
—from Miss Borden, but they were really not to her taste and she would like, if possible, to exchange them for a toiletry case or perhaps a lap desk as a gift for her husband to take with him, as a constant reminder of her love, as he traveled often on business.

The clerk at Tilden & Thurber knew quite well that the paintings had never been purchased by me, or anyone else for that matter; on the contrary, they had simply disappeared one late-summer day. She remembered me visiting the shop, and records soon confirmed that I had bought a vase the same day that the paintings had first been missed and had it shipped back to Maplecroft.

Lulie left the paintings at Tilden & Thurber and emphatically declined their polite offer of an exchange; they were after all the rightful owner of the items and she didn't want anything further to do with the matter, or Lizzie Borden. “That woman makes my skin crawl every time I think of her!”—Lulie actually said
that
to the clerk! Lulie asked that her name be kept out of it entirely, as she didn't want the police or reporters showing up at her door. She had been brought up to believe that a woman's name should appear in the newspapers only when she was born, engaged, married, or buried. Before she left, Lulie bought a handsome ebony wood toiletry case inlaid with mother-of-pearl and filigreed silverwork complete with mother-of-pearl-and-silver-handled accessories inside, everything the immaculate and refined gentleman would need for grooming, as a gift for her husband. It was her way of making a point, I suppose.